Voetbalprognoses

Football pools

A main point in the discussions of whether the Dutch football pools are in defiance of the law is the problem of skill in prediction. It is said that experts on football have a greater chance to win prices in the pool than other participants and in this respect the pool differs from a lottery. The author makes an analysis of the scores of the prognoses of football journalists, under the assumption that these journalists are experts in predicting the results of football matches. He finds that journalists, if participating, would never have won a price in a pool and that mechanically applied non-expert methods of forecasting yield predictions which are not much worse than the scores of the supposed experts.